The Red Turtle

Studio Ghibli’s first collaboration with Dutch Academy Award winning animator Michael Dudok de Wit, The Red Turtle is a playful and moving meditation on life and the passage of time. It’s an allegorical fable about human existence that’s intensely heartfelt and artfully animated, reminding us of our limited time on earth and our deep need for companionship.

A man finds himself stranded on a tropical island with only crabs and birds for company. He makes several attempts to escape the island by building a raft with the bamboo he finds in a nearby forest but he’s continually foiled by a large sea turtle.

Angry and consumed with hatred for the turtle and desperate with diminishing resources at his disposal, he makes a plan to kill the giant turtle, yet what happens in the aftermath of the confrontation between man and turtle is an unexpected  all-consuming compassion for the subject of his hatred.

This bizarre story turns into a magical tale of deep sympathy and compassion with life taking its natural course and the turtle becoming an essential part of the hero’s happiness. In many ways the story calls to mind the same themes and ideas of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (1964) based on Kobo Abe’s novel The Woman in the Dunes.

The film focuses closely on the physical and emotional turmoil of the castaway as he deals with his predicament; his determination to leave the island, his frustration, wonder and struggles. The absence of any dialogue contributes to a meditative philosophical mood in a place with no other humans and only the wind, the sea and nature all around to interact with.

The animation has a clean clear cinematic look with natural colors often used in European comics. It’s drawn in a minimalist yet detailed naturalistic style that harkens back to the popular Belgian cartoonist Hergé who is best known for The Adventures of Tintin.

The story’s underlying existential theme touches on the random connections that life presents us with and how our relationships and circumstances define our existence. Before we make those personal connections we are just consumed with selfish pursuits, but once we stumble into a deep love connection, it feels at first like a trap or prison, a restriction on our egocentric existence until one day we realize our life is being fulfilled beyond our expectations and we no longer seek to escape it. 

The Red Turtle steadily grows into more than the sum of its parts and is a rewarding emotional experience for those who have the patience to see it through to its satisfying conclusion.

JP

Tampopo

The long awaited return of a beloved Japanese art-house classic has finally arrived with the new Janus films 4K restoration of Tampopo (1985). 

Long before Japanese Ramen noodle houses started popping up everywhere in North American cities and became the new trendy places to eat authentic noodle soup, many of us only knew about this delicious Japanese staple by way of a hit comedy that took North American and European audiences by storm in the mid-1980s.

Juzo Itami’s humorous and touching “noodle western”, a collision of the Western and Gangster genre tropes, was a break-out hit that took Japanese cinema in fresh new directions and brought international attention to contemporary Japanese culture during an era that was otherwise marked by heavy period dramas from veteran Japanese filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa – Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985), Kon Ichikawa – The Makioka Sisters (1983), and Shohei Imamura – The Ballad of Narayama (1983) and Black Rain (1989), and lead to his successful follow-up films A Taxing Woman (1987), and A Taxing Woman’s Return (1988).

Tampopo was promoted as a high spirited noodle western; a satire on the appreciation and passionate relationship between food and life in Japanese contemporary culture through a montage of culinary vignettes and observations that range from the gourmet tastes of a bumbling low level office worker at a business luncheon with company executives in a high end restaurant, to the final loving act of a dying mother and wife in a low income apartment cooking one last meal for her family.

Tampopo, which means dandelion in Japanese, is also the name of a widow (Nobuko Miyamoto) who has been left in charge of her late husband’s small roadside Ramen house with her son. When Gorô (Tsutomu Yamazaki), a cowboy hat wearing truck driver and Ramen connoisseur stops in for lunch, he gets more than he bargained for. 

After defending the widow and her son in an all-out fist fight with the local clientele who are harassing Tampopo about her awful tasting noodles, Gorô is struck by her passionate plea to teach her how to improve her cooking skills. He decides after recovering from his injuries to take up the challenge and coach her in the art of making the perfect Ramen. 

But it will not be easy. We are immediately thrown into the Rocky of food films; the Seven Samurai of Ramen noodle survival in a competitive cut-throat business as she goes through Olympic style training to be the best Ramen chef in town. She and Gorô start by scoping out the various local competitors to learn the secret of the most important ingredients that go into making a great Ramen dish. 

Throughout Tampopo’s training, which becomes a little like a reality TV episode of Kitchen Nightmares and Restaurant Makeover, the film is sprinkled throughout with a collage of brief satirical sketches of unrelated food themed side stories; food as aphrodisiac, food as culture, food as an expression of love, food as tradition and food as ritual.

The two are joined by a number of food experts and masters who help teach Tampopo to understand the nature of a great bowl of traditional Ramen soup and how to serve people to keep them coming back.

Tampopo, a little known Japanese comedy that became a sleeper hit with European and North American art-house cinephiles and would inspire future Japanese film makers like Takeshi Kitano, can now, some 30 years later, be enjoyed by a new generation of filmgoers who will discover the culinary pleasures of this most amusing and unique Japanese ode to food and life.

JP